Posted
by
timothyon Saturday February 23, 2013 @04:52AM
from the such-munificence-with-tax-money dept.

judgecorp writes "France is planning a €20 billion programme to get super-fast broadband to its rural population. About half the funds will come from government investment, and President Hollande believes the work will create 10,000 jobs. Half the population should have fast broadband in the next five years, and the whole country in ten years. France is at a disadvantage for broadband as it is a large country with a lot of rural areas. However, it also has a more left-leaning government willing to take on infrastructure projects."

And yet, despite our ridiculously massive land mass and relatively tiny population, owing to fucked-up government policies we also boast some of the most expensive house prices in the world [guardian.co.uk].

It's cute the way they appreciate and imitate our Aussie culture and style. And they almost get it right, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi they never seem to manage. I'm not sure what it is though.

It's cute the way they appreciate and imitate our Aussie culture and style. And they almost get it right, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi they never seem to manage. I'm not sure what it is though.

What we do is the following: Look up for ideas around, take the best ones, add the "French touch", fail miserably.

Fair point re BT fibre - I wasn't aware of that (I've not been a BT customer since they charged me £125 for an "installation" that in reality involved someone pressing a button at a console somewhere...)

My point is still valid though - the choice is still 2x fibre, 1x copper - the ISP hasn't laid the cable (maybe some boxes in the exchange), they just rent some of the capacity, so if BT screw up, they're all screwed...

Yep, one of the few reasons that I'll be voting for the government over the coalition in September (second last and last on the ballot). Although I doubt they'll win, hopefully the pirate party will get its act together before than or Tony Abbot loses the Liberal leadership (unlikley).

Australia is a large country with a lot of nothing. There are like 4 city centres where most people live, a bit of rural population, and then a whole bunch of empty nothing. Not surprising, given the climate and geography really.

The US is probably one of the most rural nations over all. Lots of big cities too, of course, but a substantial amount of population that is spread out over a substantial amount of land.

By European standards, France is a large country (roughly 1000km across), with some rather sparsely populated areas [wikipedia.org] (the Northern Alps and the Massif Central). France also has a strong tradition of massive, nation-wide infrastructure projects (we've had a comprehensive high-speed train network [wikipedia.org] since the 1980s), so a nation-wide broadband infrastructure is a natural thing to do.

Now this [wikipedia.org] is a large country with a lot of rural areas!

As is the Russian Federation. You do know that countries come in all shapes & sizes, right? As small as Monaco, and at the other extreme, as large as Russia, spanning 2 continents and 11 time zones (now reduced to I think 10)

As does the Arctic. Okay, but Russia's next - you don't think they'd be laying down fiber in either of these 2 continents, do you? Whereas, if Russia chose to do that, they could employ the entire world's population in just laying that out.

But, if you want large countries (in Europe) that are very rural, look at the Nordic countries. The population density in France is 117/km^2 whereas in Norway, Finland and Sweden it is 16, 18 and 23 respectively. In terms of area, Sweden is the third largest country in Europe with just Spain in front.

Because... France's economy can't support it, France has a huge public debt and far too much of it's GDP is spent by the government, with it's ultra restrictive labor practices fiber optics everywhere still aren't going to attract startups like Kansas city and Google Fiber, and large government projects such as this usually end costing far too much for what is paid for.
Just for starters.

There is nothing wrong with the government providing a lot of employment and spending a lot. Plenty of successful countries that have avoided the global recession do.

In fact this is exactly what they need now: growth. A recession is caused by a reduction in spending due to lack of confidence. Companies don't get orders, don't sell things, so they in turn don't buy stuff from other companies and so on. The government can counter that by creating big contracts.

That is how you get out of a recession. The government spends its way out, and then when times are good again cuts back and reduced the deficit it built up. Over the channel in the UK our government is doing the opposite, cutting back on everything and delaying the recovery as much as possible. They want to drive down wages, cut employment rights and get rid of aspects of the government that could be turned into profit generating businesses. It is exactly what happened during Japan's lost decade, only ours is already projected to last at least 11 years.

France has the right idea. Government debt is not like household or credit card debt, you can't solve it by cutting spending before the economy is fixed.

Politicians and bureaucrats throwing money at a perceived problem or personal desire does not make for a well-run economy. Government spending distorts pricing and profit/loss signals for products and services. As a more egregious example, consider Mayor Bloomberg's recent proposal to install thousands of electronic charging stations in New York. Where is the need for them? Nonexistent. Or try the subsidies to the sugar growers. I could go on forever....

Government spending distorts pricing and profit/loss signals for products and services.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Driving down the cost of healthcare by providing a high quality state funded service is a fantastic idea, unless you happen to be someone who wants to get rich off other people's suffering.

Government has no competition and it has a captive "customer base"

The "customer base" can vote them out every few years. The government is in competition with other political parties and with the private sector which is of course free to provide alternative services.

A recession is caused when -- across the economy in general -- prices are higher than what people are willing to pay for them.

That is a symptom, not the cause. After 2008 people decided they were unwilling to continue to pay the prices on offer because they no longer had a job or because they had no confidence that they would have one in 6 or 12 months time. You don't buy luxury goods or expand your company if you think your income is about to dry up.

Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...

I think you don't get it. Companies are just groupings of people to achieve certain goals, just like a government. Sure, they aren't identical, but one would have to be rather foolish, such as you are in your post above, to fail to realize that the differences aren't that significant.

The government has a budget just like a company. It has very similar limits though being generally more power, the limits of a government can be stretched in various ways that a company is unable to do, such as consistently

The problem is voters and ideologues who give away the store every time some shyster promises whatever they want to hear. Free high speed internet installed everywhere in the country? You got my vote!

If I were French, the first question I'd be asking is it really worth 20 billion euro to connect all of France via high speed broadband to the internet? Second, could we get the same result for less?

No offense, but I just don't see that much value to hooking up society completely to the internet. Plus anyone who really wants to get on the internet in a developed country can find a way. My take is that most of the value of the internet is already here. Making it a little faster on the user side or adding a few more users, just isn't that valuable.

Cost-wise, I gather you're spending something like a thousand euro per household to connect up. That seems rather pricey especially given that a good fraction of those households are already connected.

Saying that it's just about getting a little faster is very short-sighted, switching from DSL to fiber means an immediate and minimum 100x increase in upload bandwith or more, for the same monthly ISP payment (going from 15M/1M to 100M/100M). Latency is slightly lower. This is pretty useful if you're running a business or something, probably! Now you can do video-conferencing, offsite back ups, media upload without thinking about it twice nor having to blow a shit ton money on aggregating four SDSL lines to

Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.

The "can and should" are implied by us wanting our activities to be useful. It's worth remembering here that "company metrics" are really about doing things, for example, the generic activity of spending money. Since companies and governments do a lot of similar activities, the metrics apply just as well to either.

But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government?

France, for example. The label, "sponsoring" implies that the wide broadband infrastructure wouldn't be there without sponsorship. But France has both strong private providers and a decent custome

In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs,...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.

Which one? I see three up there, companies, governmental organizations, and non profits that have to do that. Fan clubs and teaching classes have to do at least a modest degree of that, or they lose membership.

The thing about so-called "company metrics" is that most of the metrics are near universal and apply to a wide variety of groups. Basically, if you spend money for a reason, through careful choices can spend that money in a more useful way, and have a significant enough organization or possible ben

The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).

Let me be a little more clear here. France's government didn't sponsor the telecommunication network. It got in the way. You don't see the vibrant telecommunication market that would have existed, if it weren't for the various monopolies (far from just being in France) that occupied that sector for so long.

Opportunity cost is most notable for being nearly invisible. It's hard to miss what you didn't know you could have had.

That is how you get out of a recession. The government spends its way out, and then when times are good again cuts back and reduced the deficit it built up.

Yes, but the reality is that many countries didn't cut back so their credit limits were already fairly stretched when you go into recession. When investors start to question your ability to pay your debts and wonder if you're about to enter a credit death spiral the risk premiums go insane and far exceed any real return on investment you could make. If you overextend yourself the interest rates raise tenfold like Greece experienced, you can't borrow your way out of the problems when your borrowing is the ca

The logic goes beyond that though, otherwise extremely socialist countries would be better off - which they aren't. For it to work, the government has to spend the money in fashions that are economically efficient (Pareto Efficient) - which they usually don't. But to be fair to your argument, at least broadband access is a form of capital whereas the US stimulus package was pretty much pissed away...

In terms of infrastructure, the internet is hardly a bad investment in the current economic climate though. With all the focus on tech startups and the small internet businesses it's fairly easy to argue it's a good long-term enabling investment if it's done right (which means fiber everywhere).

As always, it's more complicated then that. Fiber everywhere your digging up, sure. Fiber to all the 4G access points (they are almost certainly already done). But many places are better served by existing copper for the last mile. Many others are better served by wireless data.

Simple minded, single mode solutions to complicated problems. That always turns out well.

As always, it's more complicated then that. Fiber everywhere your digging up, sure. Fiber to all the 4G access points (they are almost certainly already done). But many places are better served by existing copper for the last mile. Many others are better served by wireless data.

Simple minded, single mode solutions to complicated problems. That always turns out well.

And comments sections are not the place to comprehensively outline them. I will say though that planning to reuse the existing copper is always the wrong answer. It means you have two supply chains you have to maintain and degrading copper infrastructure.

If the last mile can't be economically connected to fiber, the correct answer is to look at stationary wireless since it almost certainly isn't really economic to keep them connected to copper either, especially considering the disparity in maintenance cost

everything is wrong with government "providing" a lot of employment and spending. Somebody has to pay for it, government does not provide anything to anybody that it did not originally take from somebody else, government can take existing wealth and shift it around to different people, but it can't create new wealth.

Down with your bullshit, magical thinking! What if I replaced "government" by "company" in your gambling? Afterall all, a company only takes and shifts money.

"Everything is wrong with companies "providing" a lot of employment and spending. Somebody has to pay for it, a company does not provide anything to anybody that it did not originally take from somebody else, companies can take existing wealth and shift it around to different people, but they can't create new wealth."Funnily, this is what the kleptocrat elites (that you are supporting) happen to think anyway! Gutting companies's employment and spending so they can walk away with the money and keep it to themselves is what they do all the time, now they'd rather attack governments so the farce can go on.

What you went on writing later is incredible but I won't bother. You say Japan needs deflation?, rofl, didn't they have quite some deflation already, long ago, becoming a zombie in the process?

What part of if you don't fucking work then you don't fucking eat do you not understand?

As others talk of roads, you do understand that roads are funded by taxing the fucking GAS that EVERYONE USES TO DRIVE THE FUCKING ROADS. I agree that it's not quite that simple and the statist has worked very hard to pervert this over the years to make taxes as "progressive" (spit) as possible, but the end here in the US we are supposed to value EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY not OUTCOME.

Then most of the world is communism...The government builds roads and all manner of other infrastructure for the benefit of all the people.Many things are simply not economically viable to do in a capitalist system, so they would never get done at all without government intervention.

Then most of the world is communism...The government builds roads and all manner of other infrastructure for the benefit of all the people.Many things are simply not economically viable to do in a capitalist system, so they would never get done at all without government intervention.

Two things, your last statement about things never getting done without government is easy to say, very difficult to prove.

Second, our crumbling and dangerous and non-innovative roads in the US seem to bend more rims on potholes and keep car repair shops in business than they do to help anybody.:)

A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see wh

Oh man, my brain immediately starts to think of about 100 jokes that involve the %$#@! global Dutch KPN Telecom, but then the %$#@!%$#@! huge-ass mega-global France Telecom monstrosity kills off each and every one.

I don't know where the claim of 10,000 jobs created came from. Perhaps it was just the overactive imagination of the submitter. But given that the figure is 2 million euro per alleged job created which is a ridiculous figure should job creation have been any sort of priority, it seems incredibly stupid to try to make that a selling point of the scheme.

Consider for example, the global flood that is the main point of drama in the classic story of Noah's Ark. It kills almost everyone and everything; it cle

I too didn't get this - how does providing free broadband nationwide in any country increase jobs? Yeah, if it encourages more businesses to come in, then maybe, but there are other factors that would make employers consider whether they want to set up shop in that place or not. Such as the work culture, which was discussed a few days ago here on/.

Government is free, since the average taxpayer is not directly paying for it. And to enough people, if they are not directly paying for something, they are not paying for it. So since the government is paying for it, and we are not the government, ergo we are not paying for it.

Think about the "2 million euro per alleged job":
France has to 'make' the optical cable, test it, deploy the mobile test equipment, the existing ducts have to be cleaned out, new larger pits may have to be created/expanded, vans, trucks have to be used to move trained teams around France.
For all the unique telco skill sets you have a few extra jobs that add up and spend in small communities and big cities as they move around France and upgrade.
Add in backhaul needs, the exchange upgrades, back up power,

So that's what the "NBN" is. As to the rest of your post, it's fairy tale material. I wasn't commenting on nor do I care how France plans to spend its money. I just pointed out the silliness of spending vast amounts of money and then bothering to add as a selling point that it creates a minuscule number of jobs.

Job creation is just one facet of the benefits this project brings. 10,000 jobs is nothing to laugh at - it will help thousands of families, and at the end the infrastructure of the country will be vastly improved.

I already explained why it can be. 2 million euro is getting spent per alleged job created. You're probably looking at 50 or so jobs (today or some point in the future) ended for each of those jobs created. That's why it's such an awful selling point.

The infrastructure improvement is the obvious good here. I don't disagree with that. My point as described with my "Great Flood" example, is that stating the number of jobs created has gone to embarrassing places.

But at some point in those 5 years the EU is going to fall on us for public debt and failed economy. Just like they did with Greece. And the plan will die at the door of the rural areas (smartly we begin by the urban areas).

.. I'd love it if they finished rolling out fiber-optic in Paris first.. Depending which arondissement you're in, the only option is super-saturated ADSL (800k/s down, 70k/s up) - or cable, which is even worse..

Perhaps having 3x the number of people will make up for that? That means Aus only has 1/3 of the fibre to run, even if they are each, on average, longer.

Population density I imagine. The big cost is labor - the more density you have, the more you get done while paying the workmen in the street pretty much the same amount of money.

Last I remember the plan to do apartment buildings in a lot of places is to simply co-opt the existing telephone copper in the walls and use it for 100mbit ethernet and run a few fiber trunks into the basement.

What I meant by copper was hooking up apartment buildings where you have old apartments with internal phone lines from a central switch. The current best-practice for those is to use the existing phone copper as ethernet and link fiber to the central switch, then use short-run ethernet for the internal wiring. That means with current technology you can do about 100 mbps easy on what's there, and it's a strata issue to upgrade the internals with Cat

France is at a disadvantage for broadband as it is a large country with a lot of rural areas

The European territory of France covers 547,030 square kilometres (211,209 sq mi). France is smaller than New Mexico and Colorado combined. It is not a "large" country and has a population density (116/sq km) comparable to PA (110/sqkm) or OH (109/sqkm), not NM (7) or CO(19).

But in a socialist utopia like France, any excuse for a government boondoggle is a good one.

So... the people in CO and NM who do not live in the state capital's don't count? Are they not ->RURAL-- enough for you? Does it really matter if there are 300 or 3000? And last I checked, there are a lot of mountains in CO (and even NM has them)

Universal access is damnably expensive but a lot can be done on the cheap. Like hooking up the highest density areas first and requiring all new construction to have fiber. Better something than nothing.

There is not one square inch where one cannot purchase broadband in the United States. 100% of the US is covered by one broadband provider or another. Every address, every plot of land, every square inch.

Anyone in the US who wants to purchase broadband can do so.

No they can't. There are plenty of people, especially in rural areas, who can't purchase broadband and it depends on your definition of "broadband". More then enough companies regard 256 kbit ADSL as "broadband".